A technical problem caused the down of TikTok, the streaming video platform very popular among teenagers. The system didn't work for several hours and users went wild on Twitter.
TikTok, the social network for sharing short videos popular especially among teenagers, didn't work for hours. The reports under the hashtag #tiktokdown arrived in thousands on Twitter, coming from all over the world and not only from Italy. Many users, in fact, when opening the app on their smartphones have found a new problem never seen before.
The problems started at 9 p.m. on Tuesday, July 6, Italian time, until after midnight at 2 a.m. on Wednesday, July 7. The data comes from Down detector, the online service that allows you to see in real time what are the main problems of sites and social networks such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, as well as TikTok.
TikTok down, what were the problems
The problem that sparked the ire of TikTok users was found for many hours and in different areas of the world when opening the app. It was a flaw in the opening of the app that did not allow users to access and upload content.
When opening the TikTok app, in fact, users were asked to enter their age. As those who use the app know, you must be at least 13 years old to be able to view content on the social network. The system usually does not require users to enter their year of birth, which is what happened last night and last night.
As soon as the user entered their age, the system returned a server error that did not allow the normal use of the platform. In particular, among the messages displayed were "Server error", or "There is a small problem with the server, fixing it now".
What's behind the TikTok outage: a possible explanation
The developers did not give a version of the reason for the TikTok downtime, in fact on the platform's official Twitter profile appeared this message: "TikTok is experiencing temporary technical issues. Our team is working to resolve them as soon as possible. We thank you for your patience!"
The possible explanation for the down of the popular video content platform is that there was a failure in the servers. In recent years, in fact, the popularity of TikTok has grown exponentially and more and more users are signing up every day.
This can only have an impact on the servers that have to handle an increasingly impressive amount of data.
Unfortunately, on TikTok as well as on Facebook and Instagram, there are hundreds of developers working every day to fix failures of all kinds and the outages last a few hours at most. There is a positive side to this story: the users who were "orphaned" by TikTok moved to Twitter and started an avalanche of funny memes explaining to other users new reasons to "throw away" their time.
Armando Mercuri